Sorry everyone, still trying to learn this forum backend. Right now some of you might need to have your posts approved for some strange reason, I'm trying to get that removed. Hopefully it doesn't take me too long... At least everyone's not a moderator anymore.

(Although, to be honest, you were all super awesome while that was happening. People even started deleting spam! I think this proves that DD players are simply all amazing people.)

The best thing I've found to kill spambots is the q/a captcha, it should be available by default in any phpbb3 installation-- set up some very easy questions that any real person would know the answer to, if they've gotten to the site for the purposes of actually using it. I've used things like 'what is the name of this game' and stuff like that before.

I've updated the captcha, but I'm pretty sure the spam is human-mediated and then turned over to bots once an account has signed up. It's a small enough volume not to be too automated and yet still steal a good 45 minutes of my day banning and cleaning

Yeah, it seemed to be the case too on the forum I put that in on, but it seems that even with human control, they can't be assed to take two seconds to look for the answer. I was spending about that long just deleting bots/spammers at that time myself, every day.

Well, it has been something common actually to get some problems with some forums as they usually are the target of crashes and some sort of backend problems when it comes to the forum software being used.

That is why when there is something like this, it would be best to make use of the proper additional software, say captcha for example. And though those are not really fool proof, you still could get one over them when time comes.